


The Other Side Of The Glass

by DoTheyDream



Category: dan howell/phil lester - Fandom
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Dan Howell - Freeform, Depression, Developing Relationship, Eventual Romance, Grieving, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Phil Lester - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-17 03:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16966548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoTheyDream/pseuds/DoTheyDream
Summary: Dan’s hit rock bottom and Phil’s only one fall behind.“Phil however, would never say he lived in solitude. He had all of his friends living on the other side of the glass.”Warnings: Alcohol abuse, grieving, agoraphobia, depression.





	The Other Side Of The Glass

Silence stung the bitter air. It seeped into the burning hollow. The amber remnants of light flickered, fading into the grey of the pavement. His eyes trailed along the cracks in the rough asphalt until his footsteps sank through. With the empty grey in his ribcage, maybe his insides had too. Numb swamped his stomach. It slithered into his throat, a home where it could make the imitation of a man gag on his own breath. He urged to spit it out.

Every part of his body seemed to made of lead, dragging him further and further down and with every thought that filled his head the lead became heavier. He didn’t like sinking. He had tired quickly of the way darkness ate away at everything he used to be. The person he once was now a fictional character to him, a hope, someone he never had been and never will never be.

A painful glance at a shattered window reminded him of that.

The person he once was didn’t have dark rings under unresponsive eyes. His skin had colour, vibrant roses blooming over golden brown. He didn’t have limp hair and dried tears across his face. He certainly wasn’t clutching an empty bottle.

Night was different now. There used to be joyful laughter, engines purring, owls calling but an eerie quiet had settled at some point. He couldn’t be sure when. It must have crept through his skin and into his bones. He’d scrape out every last trace of grey if he could, hacking brutally at the hell that followed him like his shadow, the cruel beast that suffocated every glimmer of colour. Every glimpse of saturation was strangled. Nothing was left but a murky grey. He’d force himself through it for the chance of finding something, anything, but he just sunk, choking and spluttering until he drowned. 

Tilting his head to the sky, he screamed. Fury rushing through his veins and his throat burning, he didn’t stop, not when his voice broke into only pieces of the sound, not when tears stung the corner of his eyes and sobs became intertwined with the coarse noise. By this point he was bawling, thick tears falling down his cheeks. The horrific sound rang deafeningly in his ears. He was unaware of whether he was screaming at the world, himself or the god he couldn’t believe in. Perhaps it was all three. He’d never forgive whoever made him this way.

‘This is not who I’m meant to be.’

The thought echoed through his mind, going around and around like a nauseating carousel, the lights too bright and the spinning catastrophic. He wished he could escape the way it tore him to shreds. He wished even more that it wasn’t true. Everything had fallen apart. The pieces were lost somewhere but he couldn’t find them. Why couldn’t he fucking find them?

In his burst of rage, he slammed the bottle again the wall. The glass shattered. Shards scattered across the pavement, hitting eachother in a mess of high-pitched destruction until they stilled. Silence again.

His legs pulled him through the bare streets, or so he imagined as he faded like every other fragment of hope had. The dull sky blurred and his eyelids started to droop down. He stumbled carelessly towards a bench. Freezing metal bit into his skin, his limp body falling into darkness behind the window pane.

Envy coursed through the other man’s veins as he stared from his bedroom. He had seen the brunette again. Phil did every time sleep wouldn’t come near, keeping it’s distance and cursing him with yet another night of wishing, of hoping for something he knew could never happen.

Watching people was all he seemed to do. It wasn’t like he had many other options. The raven haired man definitely wouldn’t call it a boring past time at all though. Each day people would pass by, each with their own lives and pasts and friends and the lonely man imagined them all. The brunette however, had the only life Phil knew he wanted to be a part of. He would picture it from his window, walking with him, crying with him, being someone to him. The moments he saw him became the highlights of his days. Phil couldn’t be sure where the man dressed head to toe in black came from. He just appeared one night, stumbling sleepily through the quiet streets. A horrendous thought would sometimes come into Phil’s head; that he wasn’t really there, just a person he desperately wished existed. That thought was unbearable. He’d always force it away as quickly as it came but some days the filthy disease gripped to the edges of his mind like algae.

When he wasn’t looking at people, he was writing in his diary. Long documents of his thoughts filled countless books lining his bookshelf. You have a lot of thoughts if you live in solitude. Phil however, would never say he lived in solitude. He had all of his friends living on the other side of the glass.

He wrote about them then, or more specifically one of them, as his diary entries always were these days:

I saw him again. I think he’s lost, the kind that stops you from telling where you even want to be. He had a bottle tonight, empty, like yesterday. He usually has one. I’m beginning to think it’s comforting to him, like a glass bottle in his hand has a sense of familiarity to it. I feel I understand him more now.

He was angrier today, screaming at the sky and I so wish I could have joined him. I have a lot of things to scream about. I’d never seen him break a bottle before, not until today. I wish I knew why he did that. I wish I knew a lot of things. I’ve been watching him for months yet there’s always more things to question about him. If I could, I’d ask him why he sleeps outside, where he goes in the morning and how he could destroy the most comforting thing he seems to know. But I can’t.

The idea of sending notes to him won’t leave but I can’t do that, right? How do you say to someone, 'Hey, I know we’ve never met but I watch you from my house and we’re friends’?

I’m still trying to remain hopeful.

He spent a lot of time trying to remain hopeful.

The black haired man put down his pen, closed the book and took another look at his friend sleeping across the street before sighing deeply and heading to bed. Wrapped uncomfortably in his covers, he stared at the ceiling. His friends on the other side of the glass laughed and ran and smashed bottles as silhouettes projected onto the white plaster above him.

As he imagined them, his aggregation grew, surrounding him in the boiling lava of his mind that hissed and spat viciously.

The piece of glass held him from ever meeting them, of ever seeing their faces without the shiny blur in front. It gripped his skin, clutching onto him in a vice-like grip. Phil could never escape. He knew it wasn’t the glass keeping him from the world: It was his mind, but that didn’t mean he was free. Phil’s mind was a prison. He was hidden from the people he so desperately craved to be known by. As far as the brunette knew, he had no choice but to drink alone. Nothing stung like that realisation.

Phil longed to run into the street and pull the shards from the distressed man’s hands and tell him it would all be okay somehow but instead he lay defeated in bed, just like the last night. His life was a broken clock, the hands forever unmoving, stuck exactly where they’d always seemed to have been so he went through the motions each day, the same motions each day. Heavy eyelids would open and his half awake daze he’d lie until he found the strength to place his feet on the cold, wooden floor. Heavy with traces of sleep, he’d drift into the kitchen and the feeling of hot coffee going down his throat would remind him he’s still there. Bookshelves and cabinets would be tidied, the random objects he’d acquired shifted slightly. When it was all done he’d go to the window, barely there and repeating the mantra over and over again inside his head, the repetitive commands to do the bare minimum.

As his surroundings fell through the holes in his mind, threads of his jumper unravelled between his fingers and the pressure of his hand squeezing his pale arm being the only thing reminding him he was still there, more than just a ghost. He was barely there, floating away. The dark haired man watched as he disintegrated while he watched, an audience member witnessing a questionably real man fade away. Watching the morbid display burned his eyes. See-through and terrified of the way he couldn’t stop disappearing, he admired the street of people far more whole than him. When the venom of seeing everyone seeming so awake stung too viciously he would retreat to the comfortable black of sleep.

Phil never really dreamt but that night he did, a confusing array of moments and lights flickering past in front of his eyes. As he watched the overwhelming hues of pink and orange leaking through the edges of the curtain, a single part of his dream replayed again and again. The brunette was standing on the tarmac, picking up folded letters from below Phil’s window with a grin on his face as he looked up at Phil. Bursts of joy set off at the mere thought of that. He knew it wanted it to be reality, knew that it would mean so much to him, but still, reality didn’t allow that.

The cruel truth stole his smile from him, took every last piece of hope he had and crushed it into dust. Staying still left far too much opportunity for thinking so he left his current position but that morning his legs hijacked his plans and he was back by the window like he always seemed to be.

Phil had long stopped believing in fate, or anything at all, yet his attempts to believe that the following moment was anything but were futile. Clutching his head and staring into the distance ahead, the man Phil had ached to truly know for so long dragged his feet along the pavement, scuffing the soles of his shoes. Phil never thought he’d do what he did next. If it weren’t for the urgency rushing round his head and his heartbeat crashing uncontrollably in his chest, he never would have thought it possible. Impulse has a strange way of changing everything we considered true.

That’s how he ended up sat on the floor, pen scribbling frantically against paper. Excitement made him burst into the widest smile he’d had in a painfully long time. For once, his doubts weren’t poisoning him. This was going to work out perfectly. It had to.

Hands shaking, he folded the barely discernible note into a paper aeroplane. Nostalgia overtook him with fond memories of throwing them across the classroom as he rocked back and forth in the flimsy plastic chairs and he was instantly reminded of a calmer time when he felt so free, so full of hope and innocence.

Phil leapt to the window, shoving it open forcefully and letting go of the paper. He watched it drift down, the wind picking it up and making it dance in the autumn breeze.

But he was too late.

The person Phil longed for it to reach had walked too far away and the sheet of paper fell a short distance behind. Rage burned red hot. Everything was in pieces and he was falling from the euphoria into a void of agonising regret. Half way between screaming and crying, he sat slumped on the floor, hurt and alone.

He reached for the glass next to him and hurled it at the wall, watching it fall into tiny pieces, and suddenly the brunette didn’t seem quite so lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Tumblr: dotheydream  
> Pillowfort: dotheydream


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